Decay Inevitable

by Conrad Williams

“Never mind,” she said, trying to smile to show that she didn’t care what level of divulgence he wanted to allow. The smile didn’t fit too well.

  When she felt the rain trickling down the back of her jumper she moved away from him. “Come on,” she soothed. “Let’s get us a drink. Get us both dry.”

  In a grim little pub, Sean slumped into a chair while Emma bought whisky. They sat together in silence and sipped, Sean’s damaged fingers curled awkwardly around his shot glass. The punters formed a thin gruel of human waste in the bar that evening. They were either propped up like puppets in broken chairs or sinking their measures of rocket fuel in slow motion, eyes fixed upon a hazy somewhere between heaven and hell. Around the red baize of a pool table pock-marked with cigarette burns, three men took it in turns to smack the cue ball into the pack without the manifest intention of potting anything.

  The bartender leaned against the counter at the far end, eyes swivelling up from his motorbike magazine to watch old sports videos playing on the TV that dominated one side of the room. The sound was muted; two teams – one wearing red, the other, blue – stroked a football around a pitch.

  A woman in a fake fur coat piled through the doors, the wind and rain at her back as though fuelling the fury she seemed to contain. “Where’s Joey?” she shrieked, looking around the bar. “Shitting priests, I’ll swing for him!” Then she was gone, the door rattling in its frame.

  The bartender hollered at the men playing aggression pool to help with the storm shutters, and they returned a few minutes later, having secured the wooden covers over the windows, to be offered free drinks and a towel.

  “I like this place,” Sean said. He regarded his drink for a moment and apologised to Emma for snapping at her. “It’s just, I’ve kept so much locked inside me for so long. Sometimes I think about talking to someone about it, but it’s almost as if it never happened and that talking about it will make things bad for me again. Not talking about it keeps the lid on tight.”

  Emma leaned over and hugged him. “What are we going to do?” She could see her reflection in the brass tabletop. Even in its honey colour, she could see the dark patches that shaded her eye sockets and hollowed her face. That morning she had brushed her hair and been mortified to find a hank in the bristles the size of a tennis ball. I know what I shall look like in the coffin, she had thought, inspecting the mirror. It had not taken a gigantic leap of the imagination to see how she would appear when she was old. And only ten years previously she would have been unable to legally buy a drink in this bar. All that tautness, that sass, was gone. All that pink.

  Sean noticed Emma slump and reached out, stroking the back of her wrist. When he had opened his eyes in the bath to find her sitting by him, waiting, he had been overcome with a surge of need and affection for her and knew then that he loved her. He had recognised their link, at a level too deep for him to comprehend, and believed she did too. Making flesh what had until now been some kind of forgotten knowledge made things between them awkward. But they had both found de Fleche’s house and the strange flame within it. They had both peeked through to see what lay on the other side of the portal before Sean pulled them out as the door locked, the flame solidifying and crumbling to dust as they staggered back. But this whole experience was obviously debiting her reserves of energy. He could see it in the pallor of her skin and the lines that grooved her forehead. The way she looked at him now, for example, over the rim of her glass, an expectant look in her eyes. And a resignation too. Slow fright. He knew that she was building up a defence against the fantastic events that were invading their lives. If he wasn’t careful, she would shore herself up so completely that he would have a hard time getting her to speak to him about anything. She was slowly closing all the doors, all the windows. Switching off all the lights.

  “I’ve always dreamt of that place–” they both said.

  IT WASN’T TELEPATHY, but Emma understood him, and trusted him, more than anybody else she had known. She had dreamed of the hill and its strange population ever since childhood, but she had never credited it with much thought beyond her sleeping hours. She had no idea what it signified, if anything, nor did she pay much heed to it, until now, when Sean confessed of his own awareness of the place.

  Sean said, “Pardoe told me that Inserts were agents who were trained to work in unusual territories. Under unusual conditions.”

  Emma shook her head. “But I don’t recall being trained for anything.”

  He wasn’t fazed by that. “You know I’m telling you the truth. We share the same dreams. I don’t remember being trained either. I just know something happened when I was younger. Something bad.”

  She shrugged. “Race memory. Coincidence. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not because I’m an Insert, or a Pervert or whatever jargon it is that you’re trying to sell me.”

  “Pardoe says that we are in danger if we stay here. Anywhere, more than a few days at a time.”

  “Oh really? Why?”

  “He says that we’ll be tracked down and destroyed.”

  Losing patience now. “By whom?”

  “Whoever it was that trained us in the first place, when we were kids. They thought we weren’t fully formed when we escaped, that we couldn’t have any sway on what happened. But obviously we can. He says that the same ripple that alerted him could also alert the people who got us involved.”

  He made to take another swig of his whisky, but he had finished it. The bartender noticed and brought a bottle over.

  “You saw that thing, that doorway in Myddleton Lane,” Sean continued when the bartender had taken up his original position. “We almost went through, for God’s sake.”

  Emma nodded. “What is that place?”

  “Pardoe kept referring to it as the Zoo. I don’t know.” Sean rubbed the back of her neck with his fingers. He noticed that the guys playing pool had picked up on the bandages covering his wrists. The bandages that were staining heavily.

  “Look, Emma, do you think you could help me staunch some of this blood? It’s getting a bit too obvious. I mean, do you think I’ll ever stop bleeding?”

  Emma rummaged in her coat pockets and pulled out some fresh packets of gauze. “What’s the Zoo? And how can we influence what happens in it?”

  “I don’t know what the Zoo is. I suppose it’s the area we dream of. And I don’t know how we affect what goes on in there. But someone thinks we do. And feels threatened enough to do something about it.”

  Sean was looking tired. She felt sorry for giving him such a hard time, but she couldn’t accept the way things were panning out. Her entire life so far had been dangerous, but predictable. It was when events started getting so that she couldn’t second-guess them that she became worried.

  Sean said, “I need this. It might help me to find who killed my parents. Who killed Naomi. Naomi was a part of it. She was like us. They want us dead.” His face was set and she could see this was something he had been patiently waiting for all his life. He was hooked. He said, “You’re not convinced, are you?”

  She shook her head, a little sad smile trying to soften the blow. And then: “I don’t know.”

  “Let’s get back,” he said. He said: “I love you.”

  RAIN, AND LOTS of it.

  Marshall left a dent in a corrugated fence, failing to stop as he barrelled out of the alleyway opposite the tower block. He hardly felt his knee smarting. All he could think about was the gun in his hand and the need to get up the stairwell without expiring. The smell of toasted car and petrol hung around his clothes and clogged his nostrils, flooding his throat with a burn that at least kept him awake.

  He had never seen anyone move like that before. He looked back. She was nowhere to be seen.

  He wiped his face with a soaking handkerchief. Okay. Up ahead, losing itself to the sheet of rain above the streetlamps, stood Bagg Tower, one of the less savoury estate buildings in this part of the city. He picked up his pace, splashing out into the main road, havin
g to climb over the bumpers of the parked cars clogging the street. As he stepped onto the road a shot rang out and he watched his left hand turn to mist at the end of his arm.

  It’s not hurting, he thought, a moment before the pain exploded up his side and swamped his mind. Gritting his teeth, he dashed into the shadows beneath the punched-in forecourt of the estate, grateful that the streetlamps were smashed and the windows on the first two floors dead or boarded up. He chanced another look back from the safety of the dark but still couldn’t see anything. Another shot: the shell scorched his cheek as it screamed by and embedded itself in the wall.

  He took the stairs at a canter, trying to listen above the clatter of his heart and the static hiss of rain for her noise as she pursued him. Pain flooded his body and he greyed out, only regaining his senses when he clouted his head against a drain pipe. He could smell the wetness of his flesh where the shell had torn him open.

  Here she came. Here she came. He could hear her moving through the rain. It wouldn’t have surprised him to see her dodging the drops, mindful of how the water in her clothes might slow her down. The way she moved... in his delirium, Marshall almost laughed with the grace of it. He managed to lever himself up to look over the edge of the balcony, and as soon as he did so about a square foot of masonry disappeared, inches away from his face. She was shooting on the lam and she’d be here in about thirty seconds to mop up. He knew he was dead. It was just a matter of timing.

  “Sean!” he called out, but his voice was relinquishing him, or he was relinquishing his voice. It was strange. He had never before felt so pumped up and yet so tired at the same time. The adrenaline flying through his system had no doubt been put there by the bullet that took his hand off, but the loss of blood was getting to him already. A veil was falling across his vision. There was not long left.

  Marshall let himself into the flat with the key Sean had had cut for him. He moved through the corridor, listening to the rain fly off him and spatter the thin carpet. It was dark in there. Reaching out to flick on the light hardly helped, but he knew what all that was about. Hold out, just for a bit. God, the water. It was coming off him like he had a tap switched to flood mode. It was only when he reached the end of the corridor, where the unnaturally white glare from the strip-lighting in the kitchen fizzed its acid tones across the linoleum, that he realised that it was his gored arm that was causing the noise, emptying him of blood in little spurts and spits.

  “Sean?” His voice was a croak, nothing more. Behind him, in the thrashing rain, he thought he heard footsteps on the stairwell, but they didn’t seem fast enough to be hers. He doubted he would hear her anyway. “Emma?”

  Up ahead, the bedroom door was ajar. He could see shadows moving across the wall. He made his way, perilously slowly, towards the chink of light, wondering at the motes of colour that were spinning around the threshold. A moan. He heard a moan from the bedroom. God, please, had she beaten him to it? Was she here already? Was she killing them already?

  Marshall staggered on the carpet and reached out his hand to break his fall. He collapsed against the door, feeling the specks of whizzing colour sting his flesh as though they were travelling right through him. In the bedroom, he saw through eyes that were filling with blood that Emma was naked, straddling Sean who lay on the bed. They couldn’t see him. They couldn’t hear him. Fading, he pulled his gun and summoned as much strength as he could to fire a bullet into the ceiling.

  Emma whipped her head round at the retort. Marshall couldn’t be sure if the shock she registered was at the sight of him or the spectacle that filled the doorway behind him. He wished he could have stuck around in order to find out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: WORST CHASE SCENARIO

  DEATHCHASER.

  Will thought of the word and felt the bitter taste flood the back of his throat again. He had first heard it whispered in a café that morning as he breakfasted on poached eggs and toast. It had clearly been used to describe him; nobody else was eating at the neighbouring tables.

  “You say something?” he asked the men hunched over the counter, drinking from chipped mugs of coffee. Heads shook.

  Will had returned to his meal, mildly satisfied by the way he had silenced them. There had been a degree of fear in the way they regarded him, he felt. That could only be a good thing.

  But, deathchaser.

  They couldn’t know of his mission, could they? It was something he had decided to embark upon alone. So that meant – what?

  Will twisted the rear-view mirror around so that he could see his face. Did he look that bad? Really that bad? The dusky arcs beneath his eyes, the pauperish complexion, the mottled aspect of the skin stretched across his hands – did these things make him appear as though he were on some irrevocable decline? Couldn’t it be seen as a good thing, his losing some weight?

  He pushed the mirror away and concentrated on his job. On the passenger seat lay the Graham Greene novel. The End of the Affair. God, if only. It was in a parlous state now, that book. The covers had slowly come away and he had had to tape them up to keep the volume from disintegrating entirely. He had tried reading it, during cold nights parked off the roads, in an effort to keep sleep at bay, but as much as he admired the style, he had found it much too depressing. The bombs, the hatred, the jealousy of it all. It was all a little too close to home. Instead, he ran his fingers over the list of dates that Christopher had recited to him, in the hope that the ink from those dates past might imbue him with some comfort. The list was death. The list, though written in ink, might as well have been chiselled on stone, branded on the foreheads of the coming dead, an irrefragable mark of Cain.

  The twenty-ninth of March, Hungerford Bridge, London, five past midnight.

  Wasn’t it the ultimate irony, his travelling back to the capital after such a traumatic journey north? He felt like a character in a paranoiac novel, shoved from dire situation to even more dire situation. The night streamed around his car. Somewhere out there, Elisabeth and Sadie were buried or on the run. He hoped it was the former. It seemed that anyone coming in contact with him these days was better off dead.

  He had narrowly missed out on the last date. The last English date, that was. He had neither the money nor the steel to attempt to travel to the other places in Christopher’s list. The chances of being picked up for Cat’s murder at air- or seaports were too great. Desperation had driven him to the roads. That and the knowledge that police resources would be stretched to extremes during this wave of terrorism.

  Where had it been, that last one? His first attempt to get to one of the locations after the penny dropped as to what Christopher was getting at. Somewhere outside Leeds, a village on the outskirts. Boston something or other. Will had been trapped in traffic, maybe five miles from his goal, when the time Christopher specified elapsed. There had been nothing for it but to go home. On the way, his radio told of a fire in a tea shop on the main road through the village. A reporter at the scene was saying that fire crews were struggling to get the blaze under control and that the hopes of finding any survivors were low. It had been busy in the tea shop. It always was, according to neighbouring shopkeepers the radio reporter had interviewed. The woman that ran the tea shop never had a bad word to say about anybody, apparently.

  Will checked his watch. He had a good six hours to make it to London and her river. This was positive action. Unlike the navel-gazing that Sean and Emma were being exhorted to undertake. He couldn’t understand how he had been cheated of new friends by that primping, preening prick Pardoe. For the first time he had felt safe, among similar lost souls who might be able to understand his dislocation, who might be able to offer answers to questions he did not yet know how to frame. But they were lost to him, hours after saving his neck.

  “Jesus, Christopher,” he said. “Jesus. You were superb. But I’m glad I didn’t have to live in your head.”

  21st January, Osaka, 2.03 p.m. There had been an earthquake in the afternoon, measuring 8.2 on the Ric
hter scale, just as people were emptying canteens and parks in the city, filing back into their offices after lunch. The death toll, 24 twenty-four hours later, had been put at a conservative 12,500.

  22nd January, Basel, 5.22 a.m. A coach from England, carrying around fifty tourists on a skiing vacation, plunged off the road into a ravine, killing everybody on board.

  22nd January, Darwin, 6.47 p.m. A birthday party turned into a grisly search for bodies after half a dozen backpackers staying at the Froghollow hostel went for a swim and were set upon by great white sharks. Will had seen a picture of one of the two survivors. He had a chunk out of his torso that resembled a bite mark in a biscuit.

  And on, and on. A catalogue of carnage. How had Christopher been able to foresee all of this? How did he live with the knowledge? More, why didn’t he act upon it and prevent the accidents from taking place? The more he dwelled on the questions, the worse he felt. But if it weren’t for Christopher and his crystal ball, there would be no way of finding out what had happened to Catriona, of that he was certain.

  Five miles shy of the capital, Will ditched the car and thumbed a ride into the city from a woman in a Morris Minor on her way to Elephant and Castle. In the half-hour it took for Rebecca to take him to the Strand, he learned that she was coming to stay the weekend with friends as part of a college reunion. She was getting married in the summer, to a man she had met on her course ten years previously.

  He wished her well as he released the seatbelt and lurched out of the car. She was smiling, and in the colour of her cheeks, the rude clarity of her eyes, he recognised, for a second, something in her that until recently had fed him. He felt saddened by their conversation, as if it had tried to impinge on a part of him that had once been aware of hope and love. The clunk of the door as he slammed it shut might have been the shutters locking in the part of him that had understood warmth and security. All he wanted now was answers. There wasn’t much time for sentiment. Not much space for it either.